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Mac won't start up, repair, verify, mount, anything

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Posted 26 July 2014 - 10:44 AM

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398 posts

Hi,

Let me start off by saying that I do not need to retrieve any of the data on my mac. It would be nice to have my pictures but I can live without them.

I think that this is a result of having Windows 8.1 installed on a partition and then after I deleted that partition (with Bootcamp assistance) I started to notice problems. My OSX partition was incapable of reclaiming the entire 500 GB HD so I was left with 250 GB.

I ran some updates through the app store the other day and then today is when everything went downhill. I turned on my Mac this morning and it was really slow so I tried closing apps. I opened up a game to play (LoL) and it froze, so I powered off the computer.

I tried turning the laptop back on but it got stuck at the spinning wheel screen so I figured I had to repair it. When I went to disk repair, it couldn't verify the disc and it couldn't repair it either. I had gone in in the recovery mode found by holding option at boot, but the Macintosh HD 250 GB (not the live 500 GB one) was greyed out and couldn't mount or anything. I never made a backup.

So then I tried wiping it and installing OSx from scratch in the Disk Utility but still to not avail, because when it gave me options for where to install it, the only options were the recovery drive and the EFI drive, both under 2 GB total memory.

I'm unsure of what to do. Currently the laptop is in Internet Recovery mode and I'm waiting for it to boot up, but I doubt it is going to work at this point. Since I don't need the data or anything am I able to bring the laptop into the Genius store and have them fix it or whatever needs to be done? I feel like this is the type of thing that Apple would pull a $500 charge out of the air to fix. At the very worst case scenario I could return it to my school and have them fix it under my warranty, but I'd really rather fix this from home.

Type fsck_hfs -r /dev/disk0s2. If you umounted the wrong thing, it will complain that you can't repair a mounted drive. Go back and umount the right thing and repeat this step.

Also you might want to run another fsck_hfs on your disk (use the -f option because your drive is probably journaled). By the way, TechTool Deluxe (3.1.1) didn't find the Catalog problem for some reason (you'll have this on a CD if you have AppleCare), which is why we resorted to fsck.